Kljuić wrote to Milanović: Thank you for not coming!

(Patria) - Stjepan Kljuić, a member of the wartime Presidency of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, sent an open letter to Zoran Milanović, the President of the Republic of Croatia.

‘Regardless of whether the reasons for canceling the visit to Vitez are justified or not, these few Croats who remained in Bosnia are really happy. Your sudden interest in the fate of the rest of us worried us very much. You like to brag about how you were a special choice of Ivica Račan…Račan was probably a good man, but as a politician he had no format. One of the most miserable images from the recent Croatian past was when Račan and Šuvar, as delegates of the Central Committee of the League of Communists Yugoslavia (CKSK), were appointed to attend the 8th session Serbia, when Slobodan Milošević announced Serbian fascism and brutally overthrew
Ivan Stambolić and Dragiša Pavlović. They (Račan and Šuvar) were silent and could not wait for the meeting to end.

It is truly baffling that you have so resolutely decided to look after Croats in Bosnia. You have been silent for decades, even when Tudjman was in Karadjordjevo and Boban and Karadžić in Graz (May 6, 1992).

I told Franjo Tudjman that it would be easier for the Croats to bear if he had met with Milošević in the Patriarchate of Peja/Peć than in Karadjordjevo. For us Croats,  Karadjordjevo was a symbol of the greatest suffering, because after the CKJ session we lost Savka Dabčević, Miko Tripalo, Pero Pirker, Vlado Gotovac, the Veselić brothers, Milovan Baletić, Ivan Zvonimir Čiček, Dražen Budiša and thousands of the most prominent political Croats. And I was one of those victims.

It would be easiest to say that you have never followed the political developments in BiH. This is what the founder of the HDZ BiH tells you, whom Zagreb did not allow to be the first president.

It was only when our position sank that they came for me so I became the first Croat president of the HDZ BiH. I was lucky that they did not interfere much in the election process in BiH, except that they put up 600,000 posters of Tudjman. I became a record holder in the number of votes won by a Croat since 1910.

Today I am no longer proud of that result, though it will never be surpassed, because there are no more Croats in Bosnia. Out of app. 900,000 of us, counting only
with the European diaspora, 83% of us lived in Bosnia, and 17% in Herzegovina. To our great regret, there are not as many of us today in Herzegovina proper. Where were you when political idiots and KOS (Yugoslav Counterintelligence Service) moved the HDZ BiH headquarters from Sarajevo to Grude?

You use very ugly expressions for our Bosniaks. They have paid enough for the devastating behavior of their leadership. You obviously do not know Belgrade's attempts to separate Bosniaks from BiH. This has been done from the beginning. You may not know that even one Dobrica Ćosić invited Bosniak provincials to the so-called intellectual conversations, which was later formulated as the ‘Historical Agreement’.

That is what Aleksandar Vučić is repeating today. However, the attempt of that ‘agreement’ was thwarted by the smartest Bosniaks (Alija Isaković, Omer Behmen, Safet Isović, Nijaz Duraković…). They did not do that, trusting Tudjman, Šušak, Boban, Šarinić, Pero Marković, Tuta, Štela or Praljak. They truly trusted our Croats: Jure Pelivan, Fr. Petar Andjelović, Vitomir Lukić, Stjepan Kljuić, Jerka Doka, Damjan Vlasić, Martin Raguž (President of the Supreme Court of BiH), Franjo Topić, Matin Udovičić, Ante Mandić...

And then, without any reason, Boban and his members of KOS attacked the Muslims in Prozor and provoked a Croat-Muslim conflict, which was tragic on both sides. It was the greatest success of Slobodan Milošević and KOS, and I was never able to answer the question that many world statesmen asked me – ‘how was that possible
at all’? Bob Dole, Cyrus Vance, Anton Tus and Vaclav Havel were the ones most surprised.

If by any chance the Belgrade project had succeeded and mobilized 200,000 Muslims, with weapons and military personnel, the goal of Serbian aggression would not have been Karlobag but to go all the way to Umag... Muslims did not harm us in Vukovar or Dubrovnik , as well as in a number of other cities. You obviously never understood what BiH gave to Croatia. Of the three Nobel laureates, two are ours. We gave Croatia the best in sports.

You will constantly praise the football successes from those achieved by Miroslav Blažević to Zlatko Dalić. When Croatia won the Davis Cup for the second time, four of the five players were ours. In all sports, the most prominent are the names of those from BiH.

Finally, the renewal of your population was carried out from the ranks of our country. I guess you know that Croatia is the most demographically endangered in the EU. However, a real catastrophe awaits Croatia only in the next 15 years, when the influx of young people from BiH stops. To get a genuine picture of your problems it is enough to take the phone book, so you will easily conclude that more than half are our people. It is easy to conclude that from surnames.

With the wrong policy of Zagreb, this process of population renewal in Croatia will experience a catastrophe.

I read how you would like to talk to Vučić. That would be necessary given your current situation. But not about Bosnia. It should be your duty to demand back from Belgrade the looted cultural treasure of Croatia, even by means of compensation, and most importantly, to return the remains of innocent victims to Croatian families, for which Belgrade certainly has genuine documentation.

It would be very humane, for the victims and their families to finally get peace of mind. That fascist with a ‘babyface’ would surely indulge you.

Lastly, my advice would be for you to be patient in this position until the end of your term. The fact that you were elected could only be interpreted by Epicurus' theory of objective coincidence.

And let it stay that way. It would be necessary for you to find a hobby, I suggest philately, or maybe to get involved in a non-governmental organization for the care of poor children, or associations that fight against drug addiction’, Kljujić said in the letter.